There is no doubt that spam eats up time – the question is how much? If you are a casual, personal internet user who only checks your e-mail a few times a week, you may not notice much spam. However, if you are a business professional who depends on e-mail communication for work, spam really can have a huge impact on your productivity over the course of a normal work day.

In fact, studies suggest that nearly half of all Americans spend over 40 minutes of each day sorting through and deleted unwanted or unsolicited spam messages from their inbox. Some have even reported users spending up to three and half hours a week deleted spam, which adds up to nearly 8 full days out of the year. When it is put into a perspective like this, it’s easy to see how spam really can rob you of some valuable time. Often times companies will resort to an automated spam filter service in order to reduce the amount of time wasted by spam.

Occasionally, spam email may include file attachments or even malicious code built right into the e-mail, and sometimes simply opening a message in your inbox is enough to infect your computer with a virus. This happens on a regular basis to more computer users than you may think, and the time spent recovering data and repairing computers as a direct result of spam is nearly immeasurable. Additionally, software companies have to spend an increased amount of time and effort to fight the ever-changing spammer campaigns and trends – this is time that could be spent developing other, much more useful software for the general public.